Visionary Dr. Henry Friesen reinvented Canada’s premier health research funding agency

As scientists go, Dr. Henry Friesen was the rarest of the rare: Someone who succeeded everywhere from the lab to the upper echelons of administration, and most everywhere in between.

During the 60-plus years of his Medical Hall of Fame career, he did it all.

A young Dr. Friesen excelled at basic research, winning a “baby Nobel” for a groundbreaking discovery in the early years of his working life.

He shifted his attention to academics, building Canada’s best physiology department.

Then Dr. Friesen led, and reinvented, the country’s premier health research funding agency before settling into a role as an emeritus supporter of all things science, including, in the final months of his life, pushing for Canada to snap up U.S. researchers and clinicians fleeing the political maelstrom in the United States.

“Henry is, in my view, the most consequential figure in Canadian medical science in Canada in the past century,” said Dr. Cal Stiller, professor emeritus of medicine at Western University in London, Ont.

“I hope that, with his death, people will finally recognize the depth and breadth of his contribution to science, and to Canada,” he added.

Dr. Friesen died April 30 at the age of 90 of complications after he suffered a ruptured gall bladder.

Henry George Friesen was born in Morden, Man., on July 31, 1934, during the Great Depression, into a Mennonite family of modest means.

His parents, Frank and Agnes Friesen, fled religious persecution in the Soviet Union and settled in Morden, where his father was a pastor before building a successful lumber and gas business.

As a boy, Henry excelled in school, boarding at Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute in Winnipeg, before going on to study medicine at the University of Manitoba, where he graduated in 1958, before completing specialty training in endocrinology at New England Medical Center Hospital (now Tufts Medical Center), in Boston.

But it was at McGill University in Montreal, where he was hired in 1965, that Dr. Friesen really made his mark. His early research on human growth hormone made replacement therapy in hormone-deficient children possible, changing the lives of many.

Then, the young researcher isolated and purified the hormone prolactin, and discovered that excessive prolactin causes infertility.

Dr. Friesen, working with the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, developed the drug Bromocriptine, which proved to be effective in the treatment of infertility in women. The drug could also stop excessive milk production in new mothers, and treat amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation.)

While Bromocriptine was highly successful, and is still used today, Dr. Friesen did not benefit financially. At the time of his discovery, it was frowned upon for researchers to commercialize and profit from their findings.

For that discovery, he would, in 1977, receive the Canada Gairdner International Award, nicknamed the “baby Nobel” because so many winners go on to win a Nobel Prize. (Later, in 2001, he would also receive the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award, which honours scientific excellence and leadership.)

Dr. Janet Rossant, chief of research emeritus at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and president of the Gairdner Foundation, interacted with Dr. Friesen early in his career because of their overlapping research interests, and then for decades afterward.

“Henry was a great scientist, and a great scientific leader, because he would never let go of an idea,” she said. “He was stubborn, and committed, and had vision.”

But Dr. Rossant said Dr. Friesen was also incredibly kind and humble. “There was no artifice to him at all. He was a quintessential Prairie person,” she said.

In 1973, Dr. Friesen left McGill to return to his alma mater, the University of Manitoba, as head of the physiology department. During his almost two decades at the helm, it gained an international reputation for excellence.

Dr. Friesen also accumulated many honours in the period, including becoming an officer of the Order of Canada (he was later promoted to companion, the highest rank), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Koch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Endocrine Society, a testament to the global impact of his work.

In 1991, he took on his toughest job yet, as president of the Medical Research Council of Canada. The MRC, the principal funder of medical research in the country, had been around since the 1960s, and was staid and out-of-date, funding largely basic research, in a world where science was changing dramatically.

Dr. Friesen imagined a bigger, bolder funding agency, a visionary idea that would eventually, in 2000, become the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The CIHR also started funding four broad areas of research: biomedical, health services, applied clinical and social science, economic and population health; it placed more emphasis on public impact of research.

The budget doubled from $250-million to $500-million annually (and eventually rose to $1.3-billion), thanks principally to Dr. Friesen’s deft lobbying. (It didn’t hurt that then-prime minister Jean Chrétien’s brother Michel was also a renowned scientist who supported the creation of the CIHR.)

Dr. Alan Bernstein, director of global health at the University of Oxford, and previously the first president of CIHR, said one can’t overstate how difficult that transformation was to pull off.

“Henry needed legislation and money, and there were a lot of naysayers, but he did it. … His legacy, without a doubt, is creating the CIHR.”

Dr. Bernstein said Dr. Friesen fundamentally changed the conversation about research funding in Canada, insisting it wasn’t a gift to scientists, but rather an investment essential to a healthy economy.

This “virtuous circle” argument swayed politicians. In addition to bolstering the CIHR budget, Dr. Friesen convinced the Chrétien government to fund Genome Canada to the tune of $160-million.

“Henry was a visionary – he saw where science was going, and the potential of genomics before others did,” said Dr. Cindy Bell, a former executive vice-president at Genome Canada.

She added that Dr. Friesen was also someone “who always boosted you up … and a really strong supporter of women in science.”

Later, in 2008, Dr. Friesen convinced Stephen Harper’s government to grant a $20-million endowment to the struggling Gairdner Foundation.

At the time of the transition from the MRC to the CIHR, The Globe and Mail published an article about a dinner celebrating the move, titled “No tears at wake for research council.”

Dr. Friesen was quoted as saying, “You can call it a wake, but only if you believe in resurrection.”

Religious metaphors were something he used often because he was a deeply religious man.

Mark Friesen, his son, said this tended to surprise people, because there is a common belief that religion and science are at odds.

“He always said: ‘Science can answer the how question, but religion can answer the why question,’” Mark Friesen recalled.

Henry Friesen met his future wife, Joyce MacKinnon, at Park Street Church, a legendary evangelical church in Boston, and they attended Billy Graham crusades. But he also remained proud of his Mennonite roots, including as the founding chair of the Winnipeg Mennonite Elementary School.

“He loved science, but his work was really motivated by service to God,” his son said.

Dr. Friesen was also a dedicated family man. “He was an attentive dad, a really good storyteller,” his son, Mark, said. He also loved being a grandad, hosting sleepovers for his grandkids every second weekend.

Dr. Friesen leaves his wife of 57 years; his two children, Mark and Janet; grandchildren, Zachary and Samuel; and his younger brother, John. He was predeceased by his two older brothers, Frank Jr. and David.

Not surprisingly he asked that donations in his honour go to medical research, specifically, the Saint Boniface Hospital Research Foundation.

While Dr. Friesen did not like to draw attention to himself, he allowed one prize to be created in his name. The Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, awarded by Friends of CIHR, is equivalent of the lifetime achievement Oscar for Canadian health science. Fittingly, the first recipient was Joseph Martin, who rose from his humble Mennonite upbringing in rural Alberta to become a world-renowned neurobiologist and dean of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. John Dirks, another famed Canadian physician leader, was a friend of Dr. Friesen for more than 70 years, from the time they attended high school together, then medical school, as well as landing their first jobs together at McGill.

The best way to remember Dr. Friesen, he said, is to repeat one of his favourite quotes, from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and make a trail.”

“That’s what Henry did. He was a visionary leader.”

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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary stated incorrectly that Dr. Friesen was an adviser to Conservative health minister Jake Epp in 2008. That date was incorrect, so the reference has been removed from this version.